I recently performed a upgrade of one of our customer SAP CRM systems form SAP CRM 7.0 EhP0 to SAP CRM 7.0 EhP3. In this document I’ve collected the errors we encountered during the service pack upgrade as well as the relevant notes to solve them.

During the upgrade to SAP CRM EhP3 I encountered the following error message in quite a number of the adjusted BSP components: BSP_WD_TOOLS 225 “Multiple usage of view … is not allowed”. The reason is that SAP moved some view into separate view sets. These view sets are then included into the windows. If one simply copies the changes from the SAP Repository.xml to the one in the enhances component, the views that were moved to view sets views are included twice in the window. The following screen shot show an example of such an issue in the component BP_HEAD:

In order to solve this issue, the unneccesarry embedding of a view (in this case the second one in the screen shot) simply needs to be deleted from the Repository.xml.

Component Changes in SAP CRM for Utilties

During the upgrade I also noticed some components that caused dumps although no problems were visible in transaction WCF_CC. The reason was that SAP standard changed the public methods of the view controllers. As the enhancement of a component leads to the copying of the view HTM-file, the HTM-file in the enhanced components in some cases referenced methods of the view controllers that were not available any more.

In order to solve these issues I simply deleted the HTM-file in the enhanced component and copied the HTM-files form the SAP standard component. Note, that before deleting the HTM-file you should make sure that it doesn’t contains any customer specific enhancements. If this is the case, the customer specific enhancements need to be added again after copying the SAP standard HTM-file.

During our upgrade the issue described above occurred in the following components:

IUBOTREE: The problem occurred in the file IsuBolTree.htm

UICMP_LTX: The problem occurred in the file ABoxExecution.htm

IUCONFIG: The problem occurred in the file CONFIGTREE.HTM

API Changes in SAP CRM

Besides the changes in UI components I also encountered some notable changes to some APIs we frequently used in our custom developments.

CL_GUID_SERVICES, function modules GUID_CREATE and GUID_CONVERT: The class CL_GUID_SERVICES isn’t available any more and the function modules have been are deprecated. Instead, the class CL_SYSTEM_UUID should be used.

CL_CRM_ISU_EXTENSION: The changes I noticed so far are that the methods GET_SINGLE_CONT_VALUE and SET_SINGLE_CONT_VALUE are now protected instead of public. These two methods can easily be replaced by using the methods GET_SINGLE_ATTR_VALUE and SET_SINGLE_ATTR_VALUE instead.

CL_CRM_IU_IC_OBJ_MAPPER: the method GET_ENTITY_FROM_BOR_INT has been removed. It’s functionality has been moved to the method IF_CRM_UI_OBJ_MAPPER~GET_ENTITY_FROM_BOR.

CL_ECRM_ISU_SI_SEARCH_DETAILS: The returning parameters of some of the methods are changed to exporting parameters.

CL_CRM_ISU_ORDER_GET: The method GET_IBIN has been removed from this class. As an alternative the method CL_CRM_ISU_TO_INFO=>GET_TO_IBIN can be used.

Errors after the EhP upgrade

After the EhP3 upgrade I noticed the following errors:

The broadcast message area always displayed the generic message “Please wait while fetching messages…” in IE9. Implementing OSS note 1928712 – Broadcast Messaging not working in Internet Explorer 9 solved this issue. It is important to clear the browser cache after implementing the note in order for the correction to take effect.

Using ATC during an EhP upgrade

During the EhP upgrade I noticed, that the ABAP Test Cockpit (ATC) can be very useful during an system upgrade. Instead of performing a lot of manual test to find the problems e.g. related to API changes I simply ran an ATC check across all custom development objects. The results of the ATC check already highlighted most of the problems mentioned above.

I hope this information is useful for anyone performing an EhP3 upgrade in SAP CRM.

Hi Cristian, I have a CRM site running on CRM7 wanting to upgrade to CRM7 EHP3. My customer have doubts whether EHP3 is a stable version. We are using mainly the following functionality: Account and Contacts, IC, Business Activities, Agent Inbox, Marketing campaigns. How do you experience the EHP3 version? is it mature and stable? Any special issues? Is there any sense in upgrade to EHP2 rather EHP3? Thank you very much, Uri

the current release of SAP CRM EhP3 is Support Package 04. This means SAP already released 4 service packs for EhP3. Usually the first release of an EhP (i.e. SP00) is a little shaky. After that the EhPs are usually stable. EhP3 is from my point of view a solid release with many live customers. So there is no risk in upgrading.

With EhP3 already released I’d recommend to upgrade to EhP3 directly instead of going to EhP2 first. If you upgrade to EhP2 you can already start to plan the next EhP upgrade the day you are finished with the current one.

As EhP0 to EhP3 is quite a large step you can expect quite some work in custom developments as some APIs have changed and even the BOL models for business partners have been changed in some areas. The overall effort depends heavily on the amount of custom code you have in you system.

So far during our upgrade process we have seen that the Entreprise/Embedded/Full Text Search provided by SAP is something that was very broken by SAP in EHP3 including SPS03. SAP has note fixes, so SPS04 might be more stable, but it appears beyond the points mentioned above the real issues are going to be in custom code and stuff SAP changed in Netweaver 7.40 and failed to test 😉 .

That being said it’s been stable enough for us to proceed forward to QA with SPS03 hopefully be using it productively within the next month.

We looking at option if we can upgrade our CRM to latest CRM 7.0 EHP3 to use latest features in CRM CIC by introducing FIORI and Mobility features without touching ECC upgrade as we have plans to consolidate 2 ECC into one ECC it may run for a while. In the mean time we would like to upgrade CRM only.

Please let me know if there is any CRM 7.0 EHP4 upgrade dependency for ECC 6.0. I already ran UDA tool but I didn’t get any relevant information.

interesting system setup you are running. I knew the such a landscape was theoretically possible but haven’t heard of someone actually running such a landscape.

As you might know, SAP only recommends and supports the usage of certain version of ECC together with CRM. For SAP CRM 7 EhP3 it is ECC EhP7. However, in my experience it is possible to combine different versions. We are currently running a CRM EhP3 together with ECC EhP6 for one of our customers without any problems. Furthermore, there wern’t any issues during the upgrade at all.

From experiences with last projects I’d suggest the upgradeing only the CRM system should be OK in your case. If you encounter problems the will most likely be in two aras:

CRM MW. SAP tends to add ne fields to some of the structures of the replication objects in new releases. The resuly might be that you need to create appends in ECC in order for the MW to work correctly. This should be no big issues for an experienced developer.

Some new features in CRM migth not work as corresponding functionality in ECC might not be available.

Thank you for the reply. I was just trying to clarify where you wrote SAP only “recommends and supports CRM 7.0 EHP3 with ERP EHP7”.

I tried to find that information but I did not see any information like that published anywhere by SAP so I am just wondering where you got that information? If you could point me to that I would really appreciate it.

I have worked on three CRM Upgrades and have found that the transaction WCF_CC can only help in identifying the issues in Repository.xml. When I have tried to use the transaction for correcting the issues it usually causes problems to the XML and messes it up completely. I end up correcting the XML manually and use WCF_CC only as a reference.

I didn’t have any problems with transaction WCF_CC. I used it to correct most of the problems with the enhanced components. Only in very rare cases I needed to do manual adjustments to the Repository.xml.

unfortunately I’m not able to see the image. simply attach it to your comment using the little camera icon in the editor.

If the runtime repository doesn’t get loaded there is a bug in the XML. Did you do any adjustments to the component after the upgrade already? To fix this problem locate the corresponding BSP component. Simply search in SE80 for a BSP component with the name *<component name>*. One you found the BSP component try to fix the XML issue. For example you could simply get a previous version (prior to the upgrade) from the version history. An other option is to copy the standard repository.xml and reintegrate the custom enhancements.